List of common misconceptions about the Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a traditional division of Western European history that roughly lasted from the 5th to 15th centuries. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, civilization in different parts of Western Europe receded at different rates and at different times. Eventually, the Carolingian Empire was established in the 9th century, reuniting much of Western Europe, but this entity itself collapsed and fractured into a number of states. State fragmentation and competition characterized much of the history of medieval Western Europe,[1] and this trend would remain true for a long period of history afterwards.
Even as the Middle Ages is increasingly well documented and a number of historians have increasingly focused on writing literature addressing some of the primary misconceptions about medieval history,[2][3] and as other historians take the alternative approach of highlighting many of the intellectual, scientific, and technological advances that took place during this period,[4] these ideas remain prominent in the public sphere and continue to dominate conceptions about the Middle Ages as a whole. A prominent misconception is related to the Dark Ages itself, a term traditionally used as a synonym for the Middle Ages to emphasize either its barbarity, or its intellectual ignorance, or the supposed lack of sources which this period is thought to be characterized by, although none of these characterizations have withstood scholarly criticism.[5][6]
Critical analysis of the Middle Ages has, instead, revealed it to have been a period of momentous change and, in many areas, tremendous progress. While people traditionally associate the Renaissance with post-medieval intellectual rebirth, the Renaissance is now seen to have initiated in different times in different places across Europe, itself beginning in the Late Middle Ages.[7] Furthermore, a number of periods of intellectual rebirth took place throughout the medieval period, including the Carolingian Renaissance in the 9th century and, more importantly, the 12th century Renaissance. Furthermore, despite some early debates, Christians quickly came to accept and adopt the cultural learning of the Greeks and Romans, and they further decided that philosophy and science were handmaidens and precedents to acts of higher Christian learning.
Advances in many fields were made, and among the most critical developments were the rise of the university in the late 12th and 13th centuries out of the prior cathedral schools that had been established during the Carolingian renaissance, which itself was associated with the rise, for the first time in history, of a class of career scholars engaged in the study of philosophy and learning.[8]
History of the "Dark Ages" misconception
The first author to describe the notion of a 'Dark Ages' was
During the
During the
,The concept of the Dark Ages was in use prior, but by the 18th century it tended to be confined to the earlier part of this period. The earliest entry for a capitalized "Dark Ages" in the Oxford English Dictionary is a reference in Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization in England in 1857.[14]
Science historian David C. Lindberg criticised the public use of 'dark ages' to describe the entire Middle Ages as "a time of ignorance, barbarism and superstition" for which "blame is most often laid at the feet of the Christian church, which is alleged to have placed religious authority over personal experience and rational activity".[15] Historian of science Edward Grant writes that "If revolutionary rational thoughts were expressed in the Age of Reason, they were made possible because of the long medieval tradition that established the use of reason as one of the most important of human activities".[16] Furthermore, Lindberg says that, contrary to common belief, "the late medieval scholar rarely experienced the coercive power of the church and would have regarded himself as free (particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason and observation wherever they led".[17]
Misconceptions
The medievals believed in a flat Earth
One of the most common errors surrounding the Middle Ages was that it was a period where people (or those uneducated at the very least) believed that the Earth was flat, and further that this belief was eventually reversed with the voyages of Christopher Columbus that disproved common opinion on the sphericity of the Earth. However, this portrait of history only goes back to the early 19th century, where it was invented by Washington Irving in his book A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828). This idea further gained popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries during the beginning of the debates over evolution. In his book Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians, the historian Jeffrey Burton Russell claims that "with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat", and Russell ascribes the popularization of the flat-Earth myth to the writings of John William Draper, Andrew Dickson White, and Washington Irving.[18] To illustrate the point, all medieval references to the shape of the Earth, nearly without exception, have been noted to be spherical. For example, Johannes de Sacrobosco (1195–1256) wrote in his De sphaera mundi (Treatise on the Sphere);
That the earth, too, is round is shown thus. The signs and stars do not rise and set the same for all men everywhere but rise and set sooner for those in the east than for those in the west; and of this there is no other cause than the bulge of the earth. Moreover, celestial phenomena evidence that they rise sooner for Orientals than for westerners. For one and the same eclipse of the moon which appears to us in the first hour of the night appears to Orientals about the third hour of the night, which proves that they had night and sunset before we did, of which setting the bulge of the earth is the cause. (Ch. 1.9)[19]
Among many of the other medieval writers describing the sphericity of the Earth, there is
How many angels can fit on the head of a pin?
It is frequently asserted that medieval scholastic philosophers engaged in drawn out debates and discussions on how many angels could fit on the head of a pin or a needle. This story is used to highlight the inefficient and fruitless nature of medieval intellectual pursuits when they did happen. Nevertheless, these debates did not take place. According to the historian Peter Harrison, "That scholastic philosophers engaged in speculations about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin has long been exposed as a myth invented in the seventeenth century." Harrison identifies William Chillingworth's The Religion of Protestants (1638) and William Sclater's An exposition with notes upon the first Epistle to the Thessalonians (1619) as the original sources of this myth. According to Harrison, the myth of the 'needles point' may have arisen from a pun claiming that the medieval's argued about 'needless points'.[22]
However, the problem of
Cat massacres and the subsequent plague
During the Middle Ages, cats were often kept as pets and many were appreciated for their ability to manage household rodents. The Ancrene Wisse, a 13th century medieval text, advises female hermits that "you shall not possess any beast, my dear sisters, except only a cat."[24] Nevertheless, the idea that a hatred developed against cats among Christians in the Middle Ages, followed by a subsequent massacre of cats enacted by the Catholic Church that would then promote the spread of the
The following rites of this pestilence are carried out: when any novice is to be received among them and enters the sect of the damned for the first time, the shape of a certain frog appears to him, which some are accustomed to call a toad. Some kiss this creature on the hind-quarters and some on the mouth; they receive the tongue and the saliva of the beast inside their mouths; sometimes it appears unduly large, and sometimes equivalent to a goose or duck, and sometimes it even assumes the size of an oven. At length, when the novice has come forward, he is met by a man of marvelous pallor, who has very black eyes and is so emaciated and thin that, since his flesh has been wasted, seems to have remaining only skin drawn over the bone. The novice kisses him and feels cold, like ice, and after the kiss the memory of the catholic faith totally disappears from his heart. Afterwards they sit down to a meal and when they have arisen from it, from a certain statue, which is usual in a sect of this kind, a black cat about the size of an average dog, descends backwards, with its tail erect. First the novice, then the master, then each one of the order who are worthy and perfect, kiss the cat on its hindquarters; the imperfect, who do not estimate themselves worthy, receive grace from the master. Then each returns to his place and, speaking certain response, they incline their heads towards the cat. ‘Forgive us,’ says the master, and the one next to him repeats this, and a third responding and saying, ‘We know master’; a fourth says, ‘And we must obey.’[25]
Though this source and no other refers to a massacre of cats, Engels claims that, based on it, as well as some artistic depictions where cats are shown as being killed, he can correctly make the "assumption" that cats were widely massacred in the medieval period.
See also
References
- ^ Scheidel, Walter. Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity. Princeton University Press, 2019.
- ^ Harris, Stephen, and Bryon L. Grigsby, eds. Misconceptions about the Middle Ages. Routledge, 2010.
- ^ Black, Winston. The Middle Ages: Facts and Fictions. ABC-CLIO, 2019.
- ^ Seb Falk, The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science, Penguin, 2020.
- ^ Fouracre, Paul (eds). The New Cambridge Medieval History: Volume 1 c.500–c.700. Cambridge University Press, 2005, 90. "In terms of the sources of information available, this is most certainly not a Dark Age... Over the last century, the sources of evidence have increased dramatically, and the remit of the historian (broadly defined as a student of the past) has expanded correspondingly."
- ^ Raico, Ralph. "The European Miracle". Retrieved 14 August 2011. "The stereotype of the Middle Ages as 'the Dark Ages' fostered by Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment philosophes has, of course, long since been abandoned by scholars."
- ^ Monfasani, John. Renaissance Humanism, from the Middle Ages to Modern Times. Routledge, 2016.
- ^ Grant, Edward. The foundations of modern science in the Middle Ages: their religious, institutional and intellectual contexts. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- ^ Mommsen, Theodore E. "Petrarch's Conception of the'Dark Ages'." Speculum 17.2 (1942): 226–242.
- ^ Petrarch (1343). Africa, IX, 451-7. This quotation comes from the English translation of Mommsen's article.
- ^ F. Oakley, The medieval experience: foundations of Western cultural singularity (University of Toronto Press, 1988), pp. 1–4.
- ISBN 0-89236-642-7. "Disdain about the medieval past was especially forthright amongst the critical and rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment. For them the Middle Ages epitomized the barbaric, priest-ridden world they were attempting to transform."
- ^ Gibbon, Edward (1788). The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 6, Ch. XXXVII, paragraph 619.
- ^ Oxford English Dictionary (2 ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. 1989.
a term sometimes applied to the period of the Middle Ages to mark the intellectual darkness characteristic of the time; often restricted to the early period of the Middle Ages, between the time of the fall of Rome and the appearance of vernacular written documents.
- ^ David C. Lindberg, "The Medieval Church Encounters the Classical Tradition: Saint Augustine, Roger Bacon, and the Handmaiden Metaphor", in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, ed. When Science & Christianity Meet, (Chicago: University of Chicago Pr., 2003), p.8
- ^ Edward Grant. God and Reason in the Middle Ages, Cambridge 2001, p. 9.
- ^ quoted in the essay of Ted Peters about Science and Religion at "Lindsay Jones (editor in chief). Encyclopedia of Religion, Second Edition. Thomson Gale. 2005. p.8182"
- ^ Jeffrey Russel. Inventing the Flat Earth. Praeger 1997.
- ^ English translation of the De sphaera mundi here.
- ^ "SUMMA THEOLOGIAE: The distinction of habits (Prima Secundae Partis, Q. 54)". www.newadvent.org.
- ^ Stevens, Wesley M. "The Figure of the Earth in Isidore's" De natura rerum"." Isis 71.2 (1980): 268–277.
- ^ Harrison, Peter. "Angels on pinheads and needles’ points." Notes and Queries 63.1 (2016): 45–47.
- ^ Material bodies of people were supposed to be set up together in the judgement day according to Catholic doctrine. Thus a question rises what happens to children of cannibals whose bodies are made of material taken from other people.
- ^ Amt, Emilie, and Katherine Allen Smith, eds. Medieval England, 500–1500: A Reader. Vol. 6. University of Toronto Press, 2018, 236.
- ^ Kors, Alan, Alan Charles Kors, and Edward Peters, eds. Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700: A documentary history. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001, 115–6.
- ^ Engels, Classical cats, 159.
- ^ Thomas Harrison, "Classical Cats. The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat", Classics Ireland (2002): 88–91.
- ^ Tucker, Abigail. The lion in the living room: How house cats tamed us and took over the world. Simon and Schuster, 2017, 50